It is common practice to marinate less expensive cuts of meat prior to cooking, particularly when barbecuing, to tenderize and improve the flavor thereof. While marinating is generally successful in enhancing the flavor of the meat, its ability to tenderize is somewhat limited, and it is a very time consuming process. Allowing meat to rest in a marinade for as long as twenty-four hours prior to cooking is common. As time does not always permit such thorough marinating, the quality of the cooked steak is often less than what it would have been with proper preparation.
While marinating is generally not necessary with the higher quality and more expensive cuts of meat, lesser cuts, such as flank and should steaks, will generally suffer in quality if not thoroughly marinated prior to cooking. Accordingly, people will often refrain from purchasing the less expensive cuts of meat because they either do not have the time to marinate the meat properly, and/or because they feel such meat is not sufficiently tender. While marinating is a simple process, the time it takes is often a substantial problem.
It would therefore be highly desirable to provide a means for thoroughly marinating foodstuffs which greatly reduces the time required to achieve the desired result. The apparatus and process disclosed herein not only thoroughly marinates foodstuffs in a small fraction of the time heretofore required for the process, but tenderizes the food stuffs to a greater extent than conventional marinating. Such an apparatus and process is also described in copending application, Ser. No. 142,183, filed Jan. 11, 1983 now U.S. Pat. No. 4,818,550. While the process disclosed therein is basically the same as that disclosed here, the apparatus disclosed herein has been modified to facilitate manufacture while retaining all of the benefits of the new marinating process.